Enhancing Students’ Attitude towards Biology through the Integration of Traditional Medicine and 5E’s Learning Cycle

The study investigated the effect of integrating traditional medicine (TM) concepts with grade 9th microorganism and disease topics on students’ attitude towards biology. The study used a quasi-experimental pretest, posttest non-equivalent group design. two intact classes were selected in Chiro district of Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia. The first class belonged to the treatment group where TM contents are integrated through 5E’s learning cycle with the topic Microorganism and Disease and the second was assigned as comparison group learning the same biology unit on Microorganisms and Disease using the usual approach. Biological Attitude Questionnaires (BAQ) was administered for both groups as pre- and post-tests. The findings showed that the integration of TM with the school biology enhanced students’ attitude towards biology as compared with teaching the topics without integration.

Crises and disruptions: Educational reflections, (re)imaginings, and (re)vitalization

COVID-19 has illuminated and exacerbated inequities, yet, as a crisis, it is not exceptional in its effect on education. We start this critical essay by situating the crisis in its historical, economic, and political contexts, illustrating how crisis and violence intersect as structural conditions of late modernity, capitalism, and their education systems. Situating the current crisis contextually lays the foundation to analyse how it has been interpreted through three sets of policy imaginaries, characterised by the notions of learning loss and building back better and by solutions primarily based on techno-education. These concepts reflect and are reflective of the international aid and development paradigm during the pandemic. Building on this analysis, we present, in the final section, an alternative radical vision that calls on a sociology of possibilities and pedagogies of hope that we see to be central to a new people-centred education imaginary to disrupt current inequalities and provide a new way of doing rather than a return to a business-as-usual approach in and through education.

Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Chinese antitrust exceptionalism and how it poses challenges to the existing global antitrust policy. Among the world's greatest economic powers, China brings up the rear in adopting modern antitrust law. Despite being a relatively new antitrust regime, China has not hesitated to impose harsh antitrust remedies on offshore merger transactions and intervene in business practices aggressively, departing from the usual approach of Western antitrust authorities. However, China is not only exceptional as an antitrust regulator but also as a target of antitrust regulation. In addition to being the second largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) and a principle importer, China is the world’s largest exporter and one of the leading outward investors. In recent years, the swift expansion of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into Europe has raised eyebrows of antitrust regulators. Moreover, Chinese manufacturers, coordinated by government-sponsored trade associations, have had to grapple with successive private lawsuits and hefty fines for operating export cartels in the United States.

Economic Cascades and the Costs of a Business-as-Usual Approach to COVID-19

Shelter-in-place policies and the closure of non-essential workplaces intended to disrupt transmission of the SARS-COV-2 virus are effective approaches to combating COVID-19. They have, however, caused record levels of unemployment in the United States, raising questions of whether mitigation is more societally damaging than the disease. Here we use a coupled epidemiological-economic model to estimate the impact on employment of an unmitigated, business-as-usual approach to the pandemic. We compared unemployment between March-August 2020 in ten Californian socio-economic systems (SESs) to unemployment forecast by a model of industrial sector inter-dependencies subjected to unmitigated outbreaks of COVID-19. We found that economic losses are unavoidable because disease-driven losses propagate economically through SESs, amplifying losses to the disease. While model forecasts are generally lower than actual unemployment, jobs savings would come at the cost of greatly increased worker mortality. The costs would also be disproportionately greater among smaller and inland SESs.

Longest segment of balanced parentheses: an exercise in program inversion in a segment problem

Given a string of parentheses, the task is to find the longest consecutive segment that is balanced, in linear time. We find this problem interesting because it involves a combination of techniques: the usual approach for solving segment problems and a theorem for constructing the inverse of a function—through which we derive an instance of shift-reduce parsing.

Parameter-free description of the manifold of non-degenerate density matrices

The paper gives a definition of exponential arcs in the manifold of non-degenerate density matrices and uses it as a starting point to develop a parameter-free version of non-commutative Information Geometry in the finite-dimensional case. Given the Bogoliubov metric, the m- and e-connections are each other dual. Convex potentials are introduced. They allow to introduce dual charts. Affine coordinates are introduced at the end to make the connection with the more usual approach.

Types of Life-Writing in Suetonius’ Lives Of The Caesars and Illustrious Men

This chapter highlights Suetonius’ biographical work, considering some of the literary techniques he employed in both his Lives of the Caesars and Lives of Illustrious Men, and comparing his approach with the biographical tradition in Rome. The usual approach of studying the surviving parts of Suetonius’ œuvre separately from one another and instead comparing them to the works of their predecessors within the respective generic tradition has often led to severe criticism. Many of the typical features of his biographies—such as their stylistic simplicity or thematic idiosyncrasy—can be explained, however, and thus perhaps even seen in a more favourable light, if his writings are studied in close connection with each other. Viewed in this light, it is not at all surprising that he continues his antiquarian approach with regard to both style and content. At the same time, he was fully aware of the tradition of biographical writing and thus adopted the qualities that seemed suitable to him in the Caesars as well as in Illustrious Men.

Manipulating Users’ Trust of Autonomous Products With Affective Priming

Autonomous products, which perform many functions on their own with limited user input, require users to exhibit trust at an appropriate level before use. Research in product trust has thus far focused on the product characteristics: such as manipulating the product’s design—for example, anthropomorphizing an autonomous vehicle—and measuring changes in the users’ trust. This study flips the usual approach and instead manipulates users’ mental state through priming, and then measures users’ trust to an existing autonomous product, the Amazon Echo. In this study, we used visual stimuli (images) that evoked either positive or negative emotions as affective primes to influence users’ trust before interacting with the Echo. While interacting with the Echo, users evaluated its performance and how well it met their expectations. Holistically, users’ perceived performance of the Echo and age had significant effects on their trust of the product, but the affective primes showed no significant effect. However, for the subgroup of participants whose expectations of the product's performance were met: those who received either positive or negative prime were more likely to trust the product than those who saw neutral images; men were more likely to trust the product than others. The study demonstrates the importance of meeting users’ expectations and highlights the potential to build trust by inducing emotions contextually.

Shifting away from the business-as-usual approach to research conferences

ABSTRACTTo combat the climate crisis, we need rapid, unprecedented social change. Scientists can play a lead role by signaling to society that we recognize the critical importance of redesigning our business-as-usual approach to research conferences. Traditional research conferences have high CO2 emissions as well as significant financial and travel time costs for participants. Using available technology, early career scientists Chelsie Counsell and Franziska Elmer created a global, virtual, coral reef research conference with live talks, recorded contributions, and networking events. Funding from The Company of Biologists allowed this event to be free, supporting attendance of 2700 subscribers and content contributions from 165 participants from diverse backgrounds and career stages. We provide metrics on content viewership and participation in networking activities, note the success of incorporating regionally focused sub-events, and discuss the emergence of a collaborative research project. We highlight the broad accessibility of virtual conferences as well as their increased flexibility in programming, health benefits, and cost savings. Our approach to organizing and hosting a global, low-carbon emission research conference is documented. Finally, we propose a hybrid approach to future conferences with virtually connected remote (sub-regional or local) hubs.

A functional approach to the numerical conformal bootstrap

We apply recently constructed functional bases to the numerical conformal bootstrap for 1D CFTs. We argue and show that numerical results in this basis converge much faster than the traditional derivative basis. In particular, truncations of the crossing equation with even a handful of components can lead to extremely accurate results, in opposition to hundreds of components in the usual approach. We explain how this is a consequence of the functional basis correctly capturing the asymptotics of bound-saturating extremal solutions to crossing. We discuss how these methods can and should be implemented in higher dimensional applications.